Nonpartisan tack intriguing

Evidence suggests Arizona's current system of primary elections does not serve today's voters.

Registered voters are Exhibit A.

One-third of Arizona's registered voters did not sign up as either Democrat or Republican. Instead, they put themselves in the none-of-the-above category.

They have no party affiliation. These independents are the fastest-growing segment of voters in Arizona. They represent a major realignment of how the voting public sees itself.

Yet the primary system is designed to serve an either/or electorate: either Democrat or Republican. Independents can vote in the primary. But primary voter turnout averaged only about 24 percent in recent years, down from 41 percent in 1990, and 50 to 60 percent before that, according to a report from the Morrison Institute for Public Policy.

Decreasing voter participation is Exhibit B in the case against the current primary system.

A small sliver of primary voters determines who runs the state because the winner of the primary often faces token opposition or no opposition at all in the general election. This is because all but a few legislative districts are dominated by one party or the other. That is unlikely to change after redistricting because of the federal Voting Rights Act and the way the population is distributed in Arizona.

Under the current system, the candidates who win are the ones who can appeal to the kind of ideologically pure voters, either on the left or the right, who tend to participate in primaries.

David R. Berman, a senior research fellow at Morrison, wrote in a Viewpoints piece in Sunday's Republic that the "big losers, of course, are the moderate and pragmatic Arizonans who prefer practical compromise above political ideology." All this adds up to a pretty good case for the system being broken.

So, how do you fix it?

Berman suggested moving to a nonpartisan blanket primary that allows all voters to choose among all the candidates, regardless of party. The top two vote-getters would advance to the general election. The potential exists for real change if candidates must appeal to a broader electorate. That could attract more voter participation. Of course, as Berman himself points out, "there is no magic here." There is also little evidence of how it would work in practice.

What's more, if the goal is a more moderate group of elected officials, there's no guarantee that enticing more independents to vote will accomplish it. Independents have rejected both parties, but that doesn't mean they found the parties too extreme. They may have found them too timid.

And, clearly, the goal should not be to adjust elections to produce a particular result. This is democracy, not alchemy.

The problem - a real problem - is that the two-party primary system was not designed for today's Arizona voters.

The idea of moving to a nonpartisan primary should be part of a robust public debate about how to make the system better serve all voters.